


a raven's knight

by starstrung



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-30
Updated: 2019-04-30
Packaged: 2020-02-10 03:30:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,223
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18652003
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/starstrung/pseuds/starstrung
Summary: The dragons are dead. There is no danger to throw himself blindly into. So he might as well throw himself into a different kind of abyss. It’s there, waiting for him.





	a raven's knight

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to [Tracey](https://twitter.com/_taartt) for letting me run with her vision of the Raven Queen, wow, her thirst for hot bird ladies never ceases to inspire.

The Duskmeadow District in Vasselheim is an odd place. The people living here who worship the Raven Queen, Vax finds, are surprisingly cheerful, once he actually talks to a few of them.

As a champion of the Raven Queen and a newly inducted acolyte at the Raven’s Crest temple, everyone gives him a strange kind of respect, and also welcomes him into their circles with open arms. He has very little time or opportunity to feel the outsider, like he was afraid he would. The people here love the Raven Queen, and although that love still settles uncomfortably in his throat, strains his smile, Vax finds that he is making peace with it far faster than he thought he would.

This is the longest he’s ever been apart from Vex. He misses her like a lost limb, but this is something he has to do.

He does step into the communion pool again, just out of sheer, bloody, why-the-fuck-not, and all that happens is that Vax treads viscous ice-cold blood for fifteen minutes while his teeth chatter. When he stops being able to feel his legs and his balls have _fully_ shriveled and died, he emerges, dripping, and has to be basically hosed down by some attendants. They look completely unperturbed about the whole thing, like it happens a lot. It takes fucking forever for them to get it out of his hair.

Vax waits a week after this before going to Lieve’tel, the high warden, who has somewhat taken him under her wing during his time at Raven’s Crest.

“I want to talk to her,” he says, brazen. “Show me how.”

She looks unsurprised. Vax tried to be careful and guarded around her in the beginning, but he learned very quickly that Lieve’tel isn’t bothered by his unorthodox approach to finding faith. He’s a thief, an assassin, and she knows that. It doesn’t make sense for him to kneel in shallow pools of blood and chant the prayers along with the rest of the clerics.

“You’ve already spoken to her through the communion pool,” she says. “It takes many of us years before we are granted the same privilege.”

For the thousandth time, Vax wonders if Lieve’tel is ever jealous, if she ever holds his strange relationship with her deity against him. If she does, she’s never given it away. Not that there’s anything to be jealous of. Still, he has occasionally gotten some dirty looks from some of the younger acolytes.

“That was different,” Vax says. “I could feel her calling to me, and it felt more urgent. But it’s been a while, and it’s not like I’ve been fighting anything or been on death’s door lately, and I just want to know — I have no idea if —”.

“If you’re on the right path?” Lieve’tel says, and Vax’s shoulders slump.

“I mean, yeah. I mean what the fuck do I do now?” he says. The dragons are dead. There is no danger to throw himself blindly into. So he might as well throw himself into a different kind of abyss. It’s there, waiting for him.

There’s something like pity in her eyes now, and that kind of pisses Vax off. Lieve’tel asks, “Is contentment that unknown to you?”

He scowls. “Are you going to help me or not?”

She looks amused now. “There is no special rite or incantation, Vax’ildan. If she wants to speak to you, she will.” Her eyes darken a little. “It doesn’t always end well if you challenge her.”

That’s bullshit. “The only reason I’m even in her service is because I challenged her. She would have taken my sister.” It comes out a little sharper than he intended, but Lieve’tel doesn’t even blink. She just tilts her head, regards him coolly, not without compassion.

“Then perhaps you should let this be a lesson,” she tells him. “ _Death_ can’t be challenged, or bargained, not at one’s will. You are fate-touched. This means that your thread has been purposefully plucked from the tapestry. It’s _her_ hand that guides you, even if you do not know it. I know you would like to go back to the way things were. The path you are on is not easy, and it will only be more arduous. But there is only forward, into the unknown. That is all any of us can do.”

Vax shifts uneasily from foot to foot, cowed by the intensity with which she says these words. It’s all — it’s all so _fucked up_ , he thinks, and for a moment he wants to set fire to this whole cursed place, break all of its glass and leave it all to rot. How would that be for fate-touched? That would be his own hand guiding his own fucking actions, wouldn’t it?

Lieve’tel must see this hidden battle. “I’m sorry,” she says, and Vax can do nothing but turn and leave, just to escape from the sadness in her voice.

 

 

 

The Raven’s Crest temple is bigger than it looks, hidden labyrinths that go deep beneath the earth. When he wants to avoid his duties and Lieve’tel’s kindness, Vax comes here, to pass as a shadow among all of the rest of these shadows, to read the names upon the catacombs and consider all the people that she took, and she kept.

“How greedy you are,” he says into the echoing dark, and then regrets it, when it sounds too much like praise.

When he gets tired of choking on dusty air and misses seeing the sky, he climbs up, instead, to the rookery at the top of the spire where they keep the ravens. Or rather, the ravens come and go as they please, drawn to the tower through some ancient long-held fealty to their queen.

The raven keepers are a strange breed, not as stuffy as the clerics who work in the main body of the temple, as if they’ve absorbed some of the crude irreverence of their charges. It’s always lively up there in the rookery, never a dull day. Vax came up here once in the middle of the night to find the lanterns lit all around, someone playing the fiddle while the rest danced and stamped their feet. Another time he interrupted a fierce game of cards happening just before noon, the entire tower silent except for the croaking of ravens.

It’s his favorite part of the temple by a long shot.

The oldest raven keeper, a human named Darius, keeps the strongest liquor that Vax has ever tasted. Vax perches up on the parapet of the tower, one leg hanging lazily off the side, watches the sun as it sets. Darius takes one look at him and pulls out the bottle she keeps hidden among some loose stones.

“Ye look paler than usual, lad, and that’s saying something,” Darius says, pouring a generous portion out for Vax into a chipped earthenware mug. Her right eye is missing from some long-ago accident with one of the ravens, and the scarred skin of her eyelid has since puckered over it. It gives her the illusion of perpetually winking.

“You know how it is,” Vax says, wincing a little at the burn of the liquor. “Death’s fucking staring at you in the face all the time, place like this.” A raven lands close to his knee and tilts its head at him. He tilts his head right back.

“Aye, it is,” Darius says, in that croaky voice of hers, half raven herself. Her rough, weathered hands are busy mending the thick worn leather of a glove where an errant beak or talon tore through. “Emissaries and guardians for death herself, is what we are. Don’t make a pretty picture, that’s for sure. But at least it’s honest.”

Vax scoffs a little, and Darius looks at him sharply.

“Don’t ye be making those noises at me, lad. I said it’s honest, and rightly so. Honest as a grave. Ye want someone looking after your soul in that grave, don’t ye? We’ve all got to be dispatched to that great fucking beyond at some point, some sooner than later, speaking for myself here.” She laughs at this, throws her head back and chuckles deeply.

Vax grins, swallowing more of the liquor, which he is sure doubles as a cleaning solution for the raven guano. “Please, look at you,” he says, gesturing at Darius with his hand. “Just as young and beautiful, if not more, than the day you got here, I imagine.”

She snorts, and tosses back her own mug as easily as if it were filled with water, even though each sip of it feels like it’s burning a hole into Vax’s stomach lining. “Imagine all you want, lad,” she says, smacking her lips. “It ain’t going to happen between us. You’re not my type.”

He puts his hand on his chest and tells her that he will surely die of a broken heart. She laughs at him and tells him to get fucked.

And then Darius goes quiet, her attention drawn to the ravens. The rest of the raven keepers stop what they are doing too, in unison.

“There’s been a passing,” Darius says, slowly.

“You know? You know every time?” Vax says, a chill going up his spine.

“Only when it’s someone close to her. It might be someone in the Duskmeadow District, in which case we are asked to send a prayer over their body. Or it might be someone across the world, in which case,” she grins, crooked, her missing eye winking at him, “only the ravens will know.”

And at this, like a ripple of shadow, all of the ravens take flight from the tower, sending feathers scattering. One very nearly flies into Vax’s face, unsettling him, which would have been an unpleasant fall to his death.

For a moment, he wishes he had his armor on so he could just lean back, fall off the edge, fly with those ravens.

“Here, lad,” Darius says, and pours him out some more. She raises her mug to him. “To the departed.”

“To the departed,” he mumbles, and drinks all of it, his eyes watering.

Darius takes the mug from him, and he thinks she’s going to pour him out some more, but instead she grabs his ankle with a surprisingly strong grip, and yanks him off the parapet.

He catches himself clumsily on the rough stone floor. “Hey!” he says. “What the hell was that for?”

Darius shrugs, and goes back to her mending. “Be gone with ye. It’s time for ye to go where ye are needed.”

Vax frowns. “Where I’m needed?” And then he looks behind Darius, and sees Lieve’tel waiting.

“Oh, shit.”

 

 

 

Lieve’tel explains the task set to him as they leave the tower. Climbing down the narrow winding stairs is a nightmare, since Vax is perhaps drunker than he should be, and Lieve’tel isn’t concerned with taking a slow pace.

“Hold on, wait,” Vax says, hurrying after her as best as he can manage when his vision still swims. “Why the fuck do they want me to do the prayers? I didn’t even know this man.”

“They know you,” Lieve’tel says. “Before he died, this man wanted you to say the last prayers. You wear the Champion’s armor.”

“Yeah, but that doesn’t _mean_ anything,” Vax says.

Lieve’tel stops so suddenly that he almost crashes into her. She doesn’t immediately say anything, and when she does, it’s half to herself, almost like he caught her in the middle of a thought. “It may not mean anything but armor to you,” she says. “But to _them_ ,” and in his mind’s eye, Vax sees all of Duskmeadow laid out at the foot of this tower, “it means a kind of honor. They feel as if the Raven Queen walks among us, through her knight.”

Vax is so thrown by this, that he has to hurry to catch up to Lieve’tel when she begins descending the stairs again.

“Yes but,” he says, desperately, “I don’t even know how to _do_ last prayers. I’ve barely fucking memorized the _first_ prayers.”

“I will be there to guide you,” she says, unbothered.

“Oh,” he says, and now doesn’t have anything left to argue, except that he _doesn’t want to do it_ , but already hearing that in his head makes him sound childish, so he just instead does the brave thing and resigns himself to his fate.

They reach the bottom of the stairs, and Lieve’tel turns towards him, and darts a hand out. Vax tries to dodge but she grabs him by the shoulder anyway. Vax recognizes the restoration spell right away, like the ones Pike does sometimes. It’s not a pleasant experience when it’s being used to sober you up — feels like someone is yanking Vax’s sinuses out of his nostrils. When it’s done, his eyes are streaming, his head aches profoundly, but his mind, at least, is clear.

“You could have done that before we climbed down all those stairs,” he says, accusing.

“I could have,” Lieve’tel says, with what he suspects is a smile. “Put on your armor, Vax’ildan. You wanted a sign from her. Perhaps you’ve found it.”

 

 

 

The dead man’s house is a stone’s throw away from the temple.

Vax spends the entire short walk dreading what he will find, but when he steps inside the home, it takes him a moment to remember that someone has even died — the place is full of people. Although they look somber, there are tables covered in food and drink, and everyone mills about in the small space, talking freely. It feels like half of Vasselheim showed up.

“High warden,” a woman says, making her way through the crowd, and then suddenly all attention shifts to them — Lieve’tel in her cleric robes, Vax in his stupid armor.

“You must be Thyra, Aidan’s widow,” Lieve’tel says. “My condolences on your husband’s passing.” She bows her head.

The widow, Thyra, smiles a little sadly. “Thank you. I’m so glad you could come.” And she looks at Vax, her eyes going wide. Vax tries to stand up a little taller. Gods, but he forgot how much this armor pinched.

“You’re the Champion,” she says, and a hush goes through the room.

“Uh, well, sort of,” Vax says, because telling this grieving widow that his relationship with her goddess is best described as “complicated” is probably more of a dick move than he can justify.

Thyra beams at him, her eyes filling up a little with emotion. Vax wants to turn around and leave, but she traps him, a hand on his arm.

“Come with me,” she says, and leads the two of them up the stairs. Here, they find the body, laid out on the bed, his hands folded on his belly as if he is sleeping.

Lieve’tel directs Vax in setting up everything. He closes the door of the room so that the chatter from downstairs is muffled, lights sticks of incense so that the room fills with a thin vapor that smells almost metallic. It makes Vax’s headache spike like crazy, and also makes him feel like taking a nap.

Then, Lieve’tel has Vax kneel by the bed, says the words out loud for him and has him repeat them. Vax feels pretty useless — the words are unwieldy on his tongue, and Thyra is watching this whole thing happen, what if he fucks it up? He looks at the dead man, and thinks about the life he had, all these people who came to commemorate him, what he must have been like.

He’s wondering all of this, and then he looks to his right and sees the man kneeling right there next to him.

Vax startles badly. He looks at the bed, and then looks back. The man is still _laying_ there, dead, but he’s also — still alive? He kneels there next to him, in the same position as Lieve’tel had Vax kneel in, his hands clasped in prayer, lips moving noiselessly. Vax looks back to Lieve’tel and Thyra, but neither appear to have noticed anything amiss at all.

“Aidan?” he says cautiously, tensing reflexively. “You are Aidan?”

Aidan looks up, as if surprised. “Oh,” he says, softly. He is an old man, thin and wiry, his white hair long and to his shoulders. He looks kind, Vax thinks. “You are he. Her champion.”

“And you’re—” Vax gestures at the bed. “That guy?” Lieve’tel and Thyra still haven’t moved or reacted, and Vax realizes that he’s the only one who can see or hear this.

“Yes,” Aidan says serenely.

“Are you — okay?” Vax says.

Aidan seems to think this is hilarious, because he laughs, his eyes closing up, and then Vax can see every laughter line in his face, one after another. It’s clearly a face well-versed in mirth. “Am I _okay_?” Aidan repeats, still chuckling. “My dear boy, I am dead.”

“Well, I know. That’s why I asked,” Vax says, mollified. “All right, I admit, it was a stupid question. This is my first time—”.

“Ah, am I your first shade?” Aidan says, looking intrigued by this. “I suppose that explains some of it. Well, I do think there are some things you could work on improving. Perhaps less chatter. A little unprofessional, don’t you think? It ruins the moment. You only get to die once, after all.”

“Are you — are you giving me your review?” Vax says in disbelief. “On how I _reap souls_?”

“Well, who better than me? I’m the only one who knows this is happening,” Aidan says. “Other than the Raven Queen, of course.”

Vax goes cold. “She’s here too?”

Aidan looks at him quizzically. “Well, she will be. But that’s your task here. You’re here to deliver my shade.”

Something catches Vax’s eye, then. A shift in light, a line of red. It is a thread traveling straight through Aidan’s chest, where he kneels there on the floor. Vax reaches out and takes it in his hand, and it breaks easily.

“This is for you,” Vax says, knowing immediately what it is that he holds.

Aidan takes the thread, and something in his face goes slack and reverent. “Oh,” he says, gazing at it. “So this is the life I have had.”

Vax looks intently at the thin red thread, but he can see nothing in it. It trails to the other side of the room, and into the door that is opening there, a door that wasn’t there before.

It is through this door that the Raven Queen steps through.

Her form is different this time, although her mask is still there, that white delicate porcelain, shaped like a bird’s skull. She has the torso of a woman, but the rest of her is covered in feathers blacker than night, through which protrude sharp, gleaming talons. Perhaps the most striking part of her appearance is that her rib cage is exposed, open like parted curtains. There, within her chest cavity spirals an endless starry abyss. Vax feels a kind of vertigo looking in, as if he’s standing at the edge of a precipice and looking below.

It’s a passageway, he realizes, to whatever lies beyond.

There is nothing human in her. She is tall, impossibly tall, the dimensions of the room must warp to accommodate her, for she is big enough that her shadow falls to encompass both Aidan and Vax. Aidan’s thread is wrapped tightly around one of her talons, and she pulls it taut with a beckoning gesture.

“My queen,” Aidan says, getting to his feet, gazing up, and up. She towers over him.

“It is time,” the Raven Queen says, a low whispering voice that still feels loud enough to reverberate painfully in Vax’s ears.

Aidan stands at her feet, and she bends down to meet him. Her back curves downwards, her talons set on either side of Aidan as she comes down over him. Her rib cage expands yet further with the sound of creaking bone, and like a gaping maw it swallows Aidan whole. She straightens back up — Aidan is gone, and so is the passageway.

Vax still kneels. He doesn’t think he could stand up even if he tried. “Wait,” he says.

The Raven Queen turns to regard him, but he senses that her part here is done, and that she cannot linger.

“I will come to you,” she says, and her voice sets something thrumming deep in his bones. “My knight.” She sweeps out one wing, and it stretches out across an unfathomable distance to cover him in darkness. It feels like an embrace, and more than anything, it surprises him how grateful he is for it.

The darkness passes, and she is gone. When he comes to, Lieve’tel has to help him up, all of his limbs stiff from kneeling.

“You did well,” she says, and all Vax can do is try to keep the tears brimming in his eyes from falling.

He turns to Thyra. “Your husband is with her,” he says, voice choked, and she cries in place of Vax, pulls him down into a hug, thanking him.

Night has long since fallen, and they make their way through the darkened streets back to the temple in silence. No arcane runes of light are allowed in this city like they are in places like Emon, so instead the lanterns are filled with a kind of phosphorescent moss. They give off an eerie greenish light that makes Vax feel faintly nauseous, so for once, it’s a relief when they reach the temple, where at least the clerics keep the lanterns lit with actual fire.

They climb the stairs and step into the black doors of the Raven’s Crest temple, and before he can leave to be by himself, Lieve’tel stops him.

“It was like this for my first shade,” she tells him. “It was the first time I felt — mortal, and happy for it. That I might get to pass into her realm as well, one day. I couldn’t sleep for a week.”

“It’s not right,” Vax says, fists clenched, his voice shaking. “Why do I feel longing? I’m _still alive_. She can’t have me, not yet at least, that was the deal. I shouldn’t be _wanting that._ ”

Lieve’tel sighs. “You just saw the other side of the veil, Vax’ildan. We mortals aren’t meant to see it before our time. This feeling will pass, once you spend time with the living.”

Vax, personally, feels like it would be pretty fucking hard to spend time with “the living” in a place like this, where everyone’s practically a ghost already. But then he thinks about what Darius would say to that. She’d probably box his ears for even suggesting it.

His eyelids droop. Vax feels exhausted to his bones.

“Rest, Vax’ildan,” Lieve’tel says. “You may skip your duties and lessons for tomorrow.”

Vax doesn’t try to argue this, just stumbles back to his quarters and collapses immediately into bed.

  


 

Even though he can barely stand up straight long enough to tear off his armor, it takes him a long time to fall asleep. He tosses restlessly, and when he finally finds sleep, vivid feverish dreams await him.

He has his wings in his dream, even though he’s not wearing his armor, wears nothing at all. The wings are a heavy weight on his shoulder blades nonetheless, and when he turns his head to look, they trail out of his back like dark shadows, so black and glossy that they catch the soft light and turn iridescent shades of green and blue.

He sits cross-legged on a raised platform of black polished glass, like some kind of altar, and as he looks down at its surface, he sees the reflection of a spinning dome of stars — the same abyss he saw when Aidan joined the Raven Queen.

She’s there with him, in that dream. Her body, feathered and monstrous, is curled sinuously around the altar where he sits. Her long neck is tilted up to the spinning dome, and from this angle he can see the lower half of her face beneath the mask, pale lips that don’t move when she speaks.

“I told you I would come to you,” the Raven Queen says.

“Yeah, you’ve really, uh, set the mood,” Vax says, suddenly shy. He’s never been one to make a big deal out of rampant nudity, but he feels very exposed right now. He is keenly aware that one of her talons could easily unspool his guts like so much tissue paper.

Steeling himself, Vax finally looks up at the sky, if it can be called a sky. He doesn’t think the sky should fold in on itself quite like that, so that he can see fathoms and fathoms all in one flat dimension. It’s dizzying, and he has to look away, turns back to the Raven Queen instead.

He can hear her breathing all around him, the rustling of feathers as she shifts. He can’t tell if it would be rude to reach out and run a hand through that great, quivering mass.

“Is this where you watch eternity go by?” Vax says.

“Yes,” she says. Her voice sounds like ten voices together, like the way wind sounds when it’s whistling through on a cold night.

“Doesn’t it get lonely?” he asks.

She stops consulting the heavens, and turns her long neck back towards him, the pitted eye sockets of her mask inspecting him closely. “It does,” she says, and maybe Vax is just full of himself but it _sounds_ like an invitation.

“You were mortal once, weren’t you?” Vax says. He draws his knees up and rests his chin on them. “You didn’t always look like this.”

“I didn’t,” she says. “Does this form bother you?”

“No,” Vax says, honest. “I think you look beautiful.”

“Flattery,” she says, softly. “You’d be surprised how many mortals try it when asking me to stay my hand.”

“Well, I’m not just saying that,” Vax says, adamant, and just in case she doubts him, he stands up in order to make his case. “You really are beautiful. Perhaps I didn’t know it until now, until today. Before, I saw you as something polluted, the opposite of what was good and pure and happy.” He thinks of the cracks in his symbol of Sarenrae. He had thought that was just the Raven Queen telling him he wasn’t _good_ enough for Sarenrae — but maybe instead it was just her way of laying claim to him. Showing him that there was work for him elsewhere, a _purpose_ he could still seek out.

“But that’s not true,” Vax continues. “I saw what you did for that man. You gave him an end that was peaceful and just. I know death can’t always be like that — it can’t always make _sense_. But a soul, uncorrupted, is something worth protecting, I think.”

He stops, suddenly unsure of himself. As he has talked, the Raven Queen has brought her head low enough that it is almost level with him, the pointed curve of her mask’s beak almost as long as his entire body. “I chose my champion well,” she says.

This surprises him. “What do you mean by that?” he asks.

“You see the value in a life well lived, as well as dignity in death,” she says. “Am I wrong?”

He shrugs. “It sounds way fucking cooler when you say it like that, but sure, yeah.”

“Then it is fitting that you are my knight,” the Raven Queen says, and he’s pleased by this. Somehow, it feels _right_.

He steps forward on the altar, the glass surface cool beneath his bare feet. “Can I be a bit forward now?” he asks, stretching out an arm so that it almost brushes against her mask.

“Have you ever been anything but forward? The first prayer you ever gave to me was, ‘Take me instead, you raven bitch,’” she says.

Vax winces. “That’s, uh, a fair point. Listen, in my defense—”. But instead of putting his foot any further into his mouth, he instead bridges the distance between them, ducks his head to fit in the gap behind her mask, and kisses the Raven Queen on the lips.

The kiss is cold, at first. This entire time as they spoke, her lips never moved. But now as he presses close to her, he feels her move against him, her lips opening up to him. He gasps as she moves forward, bearing down on him, her form shuffling forward until he’s forced by her weight to lay down on the altar, feel it cold and solid against his back.

The size of her is smaller now, like she’s changing her shape to allow this to happen, to allow her to settle more completely over him, her feathers tickling against his naked chest. She doesn’t have human hands or limbs — to find purchase against him, her talons rake against his belly, drawing blood, although in the dream it doesn’t feel like pain as much as it feels like ecstasy. His back arches and he lets out a whine — it’s never felt this heady to be this mortal, this fragile.

“Come here,” he gasps, and pulls her towards him again, and this time she kisses him greedily, talons pricking his shoulders to keep him there.

“You’ll have me?” he asks, when she moves away to hook her beak around his neck and press a kiss to the hollow of his throat. “When all of this is over, and my life is done, you’ll have me?”

“All who serve me have a place at my side, should they wish it,” she says, kissing the center of his chest as he pants for breath.

“Then let me serve you,” he says, and the next time he has a chance to look up at that spinning dome of stars above him, he finds he might be looking forward to eternity.

 

 

 

And when Vax wakes up, it’s still with the sensation of talons digging into his back. The sheets are sweat-soaked and twisted around him. He kicks them off, and wraps a hand around himself, moaning aloud. He doesn’t care if he’s heard — let whatever acolyte passing outside his door hear him. He can still feel her breath mingling with his, like she’s in the room with him.

He hunts through his sparse belongings and finds what he’s looking for — a vial of what he’s pretty sure is holy oil. Ge was supposed to use for some ritual, but it will do for this instead. He pours it into his hand and uses it as slick as he strokes himself.

He’s not sure if this counts as blasphemy or worship. Those kinds of distinctions have always been blurred when it comes to Vax's relationship with the Raven Queen. Either way, he might as well commit to it, and it’s not like he doesn’t have her approval.

She’s probably very keenly aware, in fact, that he would awake still filled with want, still needing to be touched. Perks of being mortal, Vax thinks as he finishes, probably being way too loud about it. He collapses back onto the mattress, thoroughly a mess, and goes into the deepest sleep he’s had in a long, long time. This, too, he thanks her for.

**Author's Note:**

> Find me on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/star_strung).


End file.
